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Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Gandalf, Dumbledore, and True Will

First, I am not a fan of
people who can't delineate between fiction, fantasy and the real
world. Naming magical orders, and schools and temples and stuff after
fictional characters and groups and places does not tend to help me
take a group seriously, and in general it won't help most people take
you seriously.

That said, fiction and
mythology can be amazing for illustrating ideas and for providing
inspiration. That's a large part of why we develop and tell stories,
to convey ideas and knowledge, and to provide icons to help teach us
things and demonstrate stuff to us. Stories can be a great jumping
off point for discussing concepts which may be useful, and sometimes
they can elucidate them more clearly than we could on our own. I'm
totally on board with using our modern cultural stories as teaching
tools and I intend to use them as a jumping off point here.

Merlin. Merlin is like the
archetypal magician of western culture. But in a lot of versions of
the Arthur legend we don't see Merlin do a ton of magic, at least not
recognizable big flashy magic. When the legend is redone for TV or
for children's books we see him do a lot more, but a lot of the time
he's wise. He sets up situations. He has a plan. One of the most
powerful things he does is to sit back and watch, he observes so he
can play the long game.

While I am familiar with
Gandalf and Dumbledore from their film adaptations I think I still
have some idea about how their characters work. They both seem to be
cut from the same cloth as Merlin.

Gandalf does a lot less
magic than I would expect. He seems to be connected to just about
everyone and everything in Middle Earth. He has a ton of influence
and has set up people everywhere who are assets able to help him
affect the steps and pieces needed towards achieving his goal. He,
like Odin after whom he is modeled, understands the coming
destruction and he travels throughout the world gathering all the
knowledge he can for centuries so that he can understand how things
flow together, interconnect, and unfold, so that he can position the
smallest, most insignificant seeming people exactly where he needs
them to achieve the one goal which over all else directs his life.

Dumbledore is again similar.
He does a little more flashy magic, and his character is not
completely a manifestation of a particular goal, but he's also
written for a modern book series for children. Despite that,
Dumbledore sets a plan into motion, well before Harry Potter's birth,
before the details of Tom Riddle's plans are revealed, for him to
ultimately stop Riddle using people who aren't even around yet. He
sets up intricate scenarios allowing characters to think they are
doing things on their own, allowing enemies to think they are making
in roads, all to put people together to give them the tools and
knowledge they will need to solve the problems he knows they will
encounter, or to gain information on, or to weaken, or give false
security to the enemy. He goes so far as to plan his own death, and
to create a scenario of infiltration of his strong hold to create the
situations and environment needed to accomplish his goal. While we
know a little bit about his life before the war with the Dark Lord,
the bulk of what we see is his life devoted to accomplishing a
singular purpose, and him observing and coordinating the world around
him towards that purpose.

In a sense, each of these
magicians embodies the True Will. Not in that they have a single
moment they must achieve, but in that they have a singular purpose
which guides them and everything they do is in support of this. For
real people, this isn't so much that we need to destroy a ring, or
crown a king, or defeat an enemy, we have to live in a certain way
which allows us to actualize who we are, find the work which is
suited to us, and be successful in accomplishing that work. Like
these iconic wizards we have a single pointed duty. Our duty is to
understand and accomplish whatever our True Will is. Everything we do
ultimately sweeps into the current of that work. The more we align
our actions, our understandings, our environments, our influence over
the world to whatever that Will is, the more successful and powerful
we become in accomplishing this duty.

The magicians in our story
don't accomplish their Wills through flashy shows of power. They use
them when necessary, when they support what they are doing. In fact,
every action they engage in, every word they say, seems to carry some
inexplicable power with it because it is drawing the world around
them into the gravity of their current of action and force. They are
stars aligning the cosmos around them in support of their own
trajectories, but in a way which benefits the overall cosmos.

A big part of the power that
defines these wizards beyond their ability to orchestrate the world,
is their ability to observe and comprehend it. They wait, for years,
or in some cases centuries, taking the world into themselves by
knowing each piece of it until they comprehend every force, whether
that force is manifest as a person, a place, an object, or an idea.
As they comprehend the whole of the world they understand its
patterns, they understand what people will do, when things will
happen, and how every small movement will affect the things around
them. While I'm often of the position that magic involves
manipulating the underlying forces of nature to bring about changes,
that it isn't just any action we do that serves our Will, there is
definitely a magical element to understanding all the small factors
involved in a situation and positioning the pieces so they fall
together like a beautiful pattern of dominoes. There is a magic to
understanding and navigating interconnectivity.

This is a big part of
magical initiation.

We don't always look at this
piece of it but it's there as a huge piece of what we should be doing
as we develop ourselves.

In the A.'.A.'. system, and
the Golden Dawn system, people move through grades accorded to the
elements and the sefirot. These grades can be accorded to the four
kabbalistic worlds and to the kabbalistic parts of the soul. In these
grades we learn various skills, and we develop tools, we pick up
pieces of occult knowledge. The real beauty of it though is that
these skills, and practices, the process of developing tools,
learning correspondences, and then understanding how these all fit
together, why they all fall within they same grade, these begin to
paint a picture of a particular worldview, or perspective, a way of
viewing how everything fits within the light of that particular
elemental world. We begin to deconstruct and reconstruct the world in
new ways with each grade, expanding our field of vision, our
apprehension of the interactions and natures of things. We change the
eyes with which we see the world and complete our capacity for
knowing and understanding the further and further we go.

A lot of people don't get
this piece of the work. It's part of it that you can really only get
by fully engaging it. But it's incredibly important. You expand the
way in which you understand yourself, and the way in which you
understand the world, and how you and the world interconnect. This
allows you to know yourself and what your Will is and how to begin to
unfold it in the world. The more you practice techniques of deepening
your awareness, your ability to be attentive and analyze, and the
more you understand the elemental components of the people, places,
and things within your life, the more power you will have to both
understand and influence the world around you. The more ability
you'll have to do magic.

A magician who understands
the world understands the forces he needs to apply to change the
world, whether it is positioning a person, or speaking a word, or
conjuring a spirit. Part of our work is to seek out knowledge from
the spirits, and from the powers of the natural world, but the more
expansive our awareness and understanding is the more we can ground
this knowledge, the more we can understand this knowledge, and the
more we can use this knowledge. If we better understand the way in
which things interact, we can understand the cause of a problem, we
can understand the solution, and we can point the right thing at it
to get stuff done.

One of the cool things about
what we do is running around gathering knowledge. The Ars Notoria is
cool because the prayers present a ton of interesting effects,
powers, and knowledge that seem like they would be useful for the
magician wandering around doing his work. The Veritable Key of
Solomon presents so many more methods and effects than one thinks of
when we think Solomonic, in doing so it presents a pretty full
picture of skills and powers a magician might gather. Going through
books of spirits presents spirits that can teach us a ton of things
and do a ton of things for us. We have a lot of sources to gather
knowledge and powers. Part of being a capable magician, part of
embodying the presence of a bad ass wizard, is going around and
increasing our understanding in tandem with increasing our grasp of
knowledge and power.